Author: Eric Saeger

Tokyo Motor Fist, Lions (Frontiers Music SRL)

Clear the decks, grandmothers, it’s a bona-fide ’80s melodic-metal fest, a new project from Danger Danger singer Ted Poley and guitarist/producer Steve Brown of Trixter. Unlike so many wannabes who have (dis)graced this column, however, it would appear that this gang of hairdos can actually write songs, an ability that may or may not be critical to rock ’n’ roll success anymore, not that anyone’s keeping track really. “Youngblood” kicks off this set with Eddie Van Halen hammer-on-guitar stuff, a ton of hookage and a rather successful nicking of Def Leppard, which is the overarching thrust here. What’s that? No, I don’t mean stupid first-album Def Lep, I mean the ideas that came from the skull of Mutt Lange, the dumb-looking producer who got himself dumped by Shania Twain for being the stupidest playa in history. Poley doesn’t have the vocal range of Joe whatsisname, but the flash-fried hormonal angst is all there. Thirty years late, but yeah, nothing wrong here. A

The Beths, “Out of Sight” (Carpark Records)

With the slightest effort I’m sure I could pirate or Google my way into finding the rest of this New Zealand act’s upcoming second album, Jump Rope Gazers, but this single should pretty much spill all the tea I need in order to determine whether they’ve got a handle on ’90s radio rock, which is the real test. They look like they’re 15, or they dress like it; there’s a certain doubling-down on the millennial ukulele-rock look that seems to be defining Zoomer bands, which is fine with me, being that they really have nothing else to be enthusiastic about in the world these days. Anyway, yeah, their 2018 debut LP Future Me Hates Me put them on the radar of all the Stereogums and Pitchforks of the world, deservedly so, being that the better parts of the record would have fit in fine between a Fiona Apple track and one of those dreadful tunes by Live, and, well, voila, they’ve still got it, going by this new track, even down to the video, which was shot on Super 8 film, comprising footage of our heroes doofing around in their Volkswagen Rabbit or whatever it is. The tune has a huge shoegaze-rawk opening worthy of Goo Goo Dolls and such, but — here’s the kicker — singer Elizabeth Stokes’ vocal never gets above milquetoast level, lending it just the amount of broke-down cred it’ll need to get the attention of tedious zines like Nylon. Good luck to ’em, I say; this isn’t bad at all. A

Retro Playlist
Eric W. Seager recommends a couple of albums worth a second look.

Many things are going to change in a Covid-19 world. Meantime, not directly related to Covid but nonetheless indicative of a burst of cultural evolution, we’re also seeing changes in the arts as far as the general regard for women. We’re still miles and miles from arriving at the right place, but the #MeToo movement has made things just a bit safer overall for women to function in industry without having to expect the worst sort of discrimination and physical and psychological abuse on an ongoing, daily basis.

The perception of women in rock has changed as well over the years. The punk-based riot grrl movement, born in the Pacific Northwest in the early ’90s, has become a bit obsolete as far as a driving social force; we’re quite used to seeing women spazz and stomp or otherwise completely own a stage by now, whether you’re a boomer who dug on X-Ray Spex back in the day, a Gen Xer who followed Courtney Love, or a Zoomer who’s into the boldly androgynous vibe of Billie Eilish.

It’s still a work in progress. Looking back at my review of Dead Weather’s 2015 album Dodge and Burn, I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t go off on some tangent about women rockers needing an Eilish-style next-step. Yes, singer Alison Mosshart was/is a badass when she’s fronting The Kills, but her role in that band feels like more of a Robert Plant to Jack White’s Jimmy Page than an equal partner. There’s just something sketchy about it, is what I mean. Maybe it’s the band’s (well done) ’70s hard rock image, but it felt like less of an equal partnership than a case of White saying “She’ll do.” The number of female musicians and singers to whom White has played Svengali has bugged me for a while now, and I could be dead wrong, but I’ll just leave it at that.

To me, the queen of rock is and always has been Chrissie Hynde. The woman just doesn’t care about what you think, as we talked about in 2008 when the long-overdue ninth Pretenders album, Break Up The Concrete, landed. On that one, there was the bit where she comically sounded out a drum roll with her voice in one of the songs, another example on the album in which she flaunted her power level like an alternate-universe George Thorogood trying to save the world from greed and stupidity. Always, my vote would be Chrissie for President.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Email [email protected] for fastest response.

PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, July 10, is the next general release date for albums, when we will hear new material from Rufus Wainwright, whose new album, Unfollow the Rules, is in the trucks and on the way to stores, if there are any stores even left! Isn’t that exciting? No? Come on, you guys, you know, it’s Rufus Wainwright. No, I don’t know any of his songs either. All I know is that he was born around the time John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were making up crazy lies about each other in order to convince voters they should be the one to be president. Aren’t you glad that things have evolved so much, in our political arena? Wait, Wiki is telling me that Rufus Wainwright didn’t participate in the Battle of Bunker Hill, he was actually born in 1973. Huh, I thought he was some super-old dude who didn’t make it as big as the O’Jays or Minnie Ripperton. Wait, let me read this more. Let’s see, Blah blah blah, likes opera … his career peak was in 2007, when his album Release the Stars climbed to No. 23 on the Billboard payola spreadsheet, and his mopey sadboy piano “Going to a Town” did OK. He’s done acting. He’s Canadian. Burp. Did I miss anything? His new song is “Damsel in Distress,” a Harry Nilsson-ish tune, heavy on the wide-screen ’70s taxicab-radio vibe. It’s OK, but it’s definitely not opera. Jeez, the more it goes on, the more it sounds like every ’70s song ever made thrown into a blender. He should stick to acting.

• Mike Skinner is the white rapper dude who makes albums in his U.K. bedroom under the name The Streets, a project that’s huge in England but hasn’t yet cracked the U.S. Top 50. All that means is that I could probably deal with whatever Skinner’s selling on his new mixtape, None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive, because it’s probably crummy British-cockney hip-hop, not crummy American Jeezy/Eminem-wannabe hip-hop. Yep, there it is, listening to the single “Call My Phone Thinking I’m Doing Nothing Better,” I am drowning in chill-out cockney rap that’s got a bumpy, off-kilter, mildly Gorillaz-ish beat, all made the better because Tame Impala is the guest. In other words it’s a tasteful, mellow Tame Impala song, except with Skinner doing his Stormzy imitation. All right? OK, everyone, single file, let’s move along.

• Julianna Barwick is said to be a New Age ambient artist, but I’ll be the judge of that. Her trip is using an electronic loop station to decorate her voice, which is interesting, and she was commissioned to remix Radiohead’s “Reckoner,” which I won’t bother listening to because I don’t have to. Her new album, Healing is a Miracle, is out within mere hours and features the single “Inspirit.” Hmf, it builds up for two minutes with multi-overdubbed vocals with from-the-mountaintop effects on them, yet never turns into something that would make me say, “Jeepers, that’s almost as nice as Enya.” Actually make that four minutes. Nothing happened, why did I bother.

• Lastly, The Fader calls Margo Price “country’s next star,” so maybe her new album That’s How Rumors Get Started will make me say the same thing after I hear the single “Twinkle Twinkle.” Hmm, I dunno, it has fuzzed-out ’70s Deep Purple guitars, but she sounds like KT Tunstall or something. It’s cool, I guess. Is it OK if I just call her “country’s next Deep Purple lady” or whatever?

High Spirits, Hard To Stop (High Roller Records)

This is one of the many projects of metal guitar god Chris “The Professor” Black, who is from Chicago. He’s an alpha type for sure, insisting on diving into projects that call for him to play different instruments, including drums, and, well, he’s just, you know, one of these spazzy workaholics who’s got to be busy over his head all the time. In fact, last year, if I’m even reading this thing correctly, he recorded three solo albums under three different band names, and so on and so forth. He’s pretty stretched, is the takeaway, which shows in this tightly recorded set of NWOBHM/power-metal tunes, the first of which showed me exactly how thinly stretched he is; to wit, album opener “Since You’ve Been Gone” actually does borrow the chorus of the 1979 pop-metal song of the same name by Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. I mean, the song’s much faster, like Savatage speed, but man, it’s hard to get past that. The other songs, despite having some great solos, are pretty rote examples of Mayyyden and Prieeeest worship, which wouldn’t have turned me off completely, but come on dude, slow down and think a little. B-

Bananagun, The True Story of Bananagun (High Roller Records)

If Flaming Lips were as Afrobeat-driven as Vampire Weekend, this is what it would … no, that’s not really it, because this is really old-sounding but in a good, super-cool way. It’s the first record by Melbourne, Australia-based multi-instrumentalist/singer Nick Van Bakel in a band setting, I understand, not that he’s ever been on my radar before, but it’s quite the revelation. This is all heavily groove-driven, heavy on the ’70s blaxploitation cinematics but instead of adamantly African Fela Kuti-style singalongs, the multi-vocal tracks evoke The Byrds, but not in that crummy Aughts-indie way, like the singing is all in key and whatnot. If you’ve heard really old Santana albums, this is similar product, rudimentary and analog in the overall sound, but with a slightly more polished feel. Ever watch the scenes in old Starsky & Hutch episodes where they’re chasing guys around with guns? It sounds like that, except with pro-enough Byrds vocals. Quentin Tarantino would love this, put it that way. A+

Retro Playlist

Eric W. Saeger recommends a couple of albums worth a second look.

Over these last interminable weeks we’ve looked at a lot of musical genres, but one of the things I’ve pretty much successfully avoided looking back at is old music, specifically antique arena rock. Granted, we did talk about Yes a while back in a different section, and I got roundly trolled for it by a reader, but we also covered the need for moronic silliness in this space, and I’d like to go back to that for just a second, skimming the most notable output of one of the great arena bands, New York City’s Blue Oyster Cult, which does tend to get name-checked in the course of my ravings.

The first thing you younglings should know about BOC is that they were hardly the missing link between punk and arena-rock that historians make them out to be. Their biggest album, 1976’s Agents of Fortune, was, put simply, the greatest vampire-centric classic-rock album of all time and had nothing punk on it at all. Assuming you haven’t spent your entire 20-whatever years off the grid, there’s no way you’ve avoided that album’s classic hit “Don’t Fear The Reaper,” the song Saturday Night Live made fun of during the Will Ferrell era (“more cowbell!”) and which was most recently used as an episode-closing tune on Orange is the New Black. My favorite from that record was “ETI,” which still kicks so much ass that you’ll need to sit on an orthopedic pillow for a week after listening to it.

Fact is, though, that album was pretty much their last chance to avoid becoming known as a joke band, which I didn’t even realize until I got into it with a Facebook friend a couple of weeks back. Really the only thing punk about the band was that the band’s second-banana guitarist, Allen Lanier, once dated punk goddess Patti Smith, probably because, my bro insists, she was otherwise homeless at the time. Listening to AOF’s preceding LP, 1974’s awesome-stupid-awesome-structured Secret Treaties, the other day, it really dawned on me that they were indeed just a bad album-closing song (which “Astronomy” is definitely not) away from registering as a joke band before AOF: part Grateful Dead, part Traffic and part Black Sabbath. Anyhow, younglings, now you know the rest of the story. Just put “ETI” and “Astronomy” in your Spotify and you can call yourself a BOC expert. You’re quite welcome.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Email [email protected] for fastest response.

PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Barring further apocalypse, including my own demise from end-stage quarantine boredom, June 26 will occur, and that date is a Friday, a day full of awesome and awful new music albums for young and old! The most high-profile release scheduled for that date is the new one from Los Angeles sisters HAIM, called Women in Music Pt. III! Naturally, there wasn’t a Women in Music Pt. I or II, it’s their quirky L.A. way of saying this is their third album, which will cause some confusion, but who cares, as nothing makes sense anyway nowadays, other than my desire for greasy fish and chips at the closest beach, not that we’ll probably ever be at the point again when I can just walk into one of those joints without having to cover myself in Purell and Lysol mixed with cheap suntan lotion. Whatever, I’ll go check out the song “The Steps,” which came out the same day as the album preorder. Everyone’s talking about this tune, not that I know why. I mean, if you’ve always wanted to hear a twentysomething version of Sheryl Crow whine about having a rotten boyfriend (aren’t we all at some point?) while a subtle, countrified ripoff of the guitar line from “My Girl” plays underneath, you’ve hit the jackpot. In the meantime I’ll just be sitting here patiently, waiting for corporate pop-rock to evolve, which I’m sure will happen as soon as I can get some fried fish, the latter of which is the only thing I really care about, to be honest.

• Corb Lund is a Canadian cowboy singer, but wait, before you go do the Sudoku, there are actual cowboys in Canada, mostly in and around Edmonton, which is in Alberta, and guess what, this dude is from the town of Taber, in Alberta, whose corn crop is so awesome that they have a “Cornfest” every August. Now, I don’t know why they need cowboys to wrangle corn, but whatever, I’ll just go with it and say that Lund is a Canadian corn cowboy, who makes country music. Ha ha, this is funny, his touring band is called the Hurtin’ Albertans. I like him already! His new corn-wranglin’ cowboy-hat album is Agricultural Tragic, and the single “Raining Horses” isn’t bad, with its nice shimmery Americana guitar line. Only problem is I wish it wasn’t him singing, because he’s kinda boring, but — hold it, some dobro just appeared in the song, so its stock went up a little bit. It’s pretty, but he’s boring, let’s move on.

• No way, it’s fossilized arena-rock legends Kansas, with a new album! I haven’t checked to see yet which original band members are here; I’ll bet you anything there was a huge court fight, and there’s another band out there called “Kansas Featuring Blah Blah Blah” because legalities. Indeed, which members are putting out this new album, The Absence of Presence? Yup, told ya, it’s just the lead guitarist and the drummer, because all the other original members hate those guys. Original singer Steve Walsh isn’t here. Do I really have to do this? OK, one new song is called “Throwing Mountains,” and it’s an awesome prog-rock song. I would go to their show if they had fried fish at the concession stand.

• To wrap up this week, let’s listen to “Strong Enough,” from the album Monovision by Ray LaMontagne, who is from Nashua! Wow, this is kind of like a cross between Creedence Clearwater Revival and that old Stealers Wheel song, “Stuck in the Middle With You.” It’s cool, be nice to this singing man from Nashua.

OTR, Lost at Midnight (Astralwerks Records)
Well wow, I got back into the Astralwerks system just in the nick of time, because I’ve found your go-to summer-drive-to-the-beach album, right here. OTR is the producer-nom of Ryan Chadwick, who was studying aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati, where, just as he was about to write his master’s thesis, the department sort of imploded, and he dumped the whole thing to sit and chill to the sounds of two-guy soundsystem Odesza. That led to his futzing around on his own answer to that style of beauty-dripping, trance-tinged techno, which eventually led to this absolutely hypnotic debut LP. We’ve seen the way-overdue rise of prog-house and trance being incorporated into pop, starting way back with Madonna’s “Ray of Light” and then on to Britney et al, but this is the closest thing you’ll find to Above & Beyond served as a pop venture. That means that it’s less caustic than Odesza can tend to get; it’s more like a mutant hybrid of Bon Iver and mellow-mode Tiesta. You will love this record. A+

Bitter Pill, Desperate Times on the New Hampshire State Line (self-released)
We talked about this New Hampshire-based band a few weeks ago, relative to the tire-kicker single from this full-length. Turns out they’re from Somersworth, or at least Billy, the dad, is. He’s the prime mover for this quintet, which also features his daughter Emily on ukulele and the Billie Holiday and Patsy Cline imitations that are found randomly shuffled into the tracklist here. These are old souls, these people; I don’t know if they’re ever tasted real poverty, but the raw, half-jokey tunes that Billy sings bespeak a life in which broken-mirror-level stretches of luck were probably commonplace, which means they’re pretty cool as far as I can tell. I suppose I’ll have to see for myself at one of their shows if the timing is right. Their trip ranges from punkabilly to Zappa-meets-Amy Winehouse at its most alluring; to give you an idea, I expected their “Land of the Lost” to be a chill cover of the kids’ show from the 1970s, but it’s actually like Patsy jamming with Hank Williams Sr. in a perfect storm of fearless bluegrass. They’ve got a studious banjo player in Michael McKay, who gets a solo turn at one point. Listen — no, don’t be cheap, buy the full-length at bitterpill.bandcamp.com/album/desperate-times-on-the-new-hampshire-state-line. A

Retro Playlist
Eric W. Saeger recommends a couple albums worth a second look.

Though live music is starting to reemerge in outdoor spaces, one of the many dreadful things about the coronavirus shutdown has been the absence of live music shows. They were replaced by remote “concerts” performed online, where band members, dutifully staying in place in their respective homes, jam together while streaming over Zoom or FaceTime or whatnot.

What I wondered about was some of the older bands, particularly the hair-metal bands, largely composed of guys whose careers had peaked way before the digital age. You may have noticed that once in a while I like to give them some love here in this space, especially the bands that have had recent albums put out by such record labels as Nuclear Blast (Accept, Agnostic Front and Anthrax, just to cover the ones beginning with the letter A) and of course SPV, which I often refer to lovingly as “SPV Mercy Hospital” or “The SPV Home For Retired Metal Acts.” Those record companies will put out basically anything as long as the band had some modicum of fame during the 1970s or 1980s. In April of last year we chatted about Suzi Quatro’s then-new album Mettavolution, and I realized then that I hadn’t heard her name in exactly 4,189 years. A bassist, she not only ran her own band but touched TV stardom, playing Fonzie’s tough-chick female-bro Pinky Tuscadero on Happy Days. Anyway, Mettavolution is full of your typical ’80s bar-rock dross, but she added a real brass section in the tunes “Strings,” which made the album interesting enough. Poor Suzi, I couldn’t find any streaming shows in her schedule, but she does have a few German shows in queue.

The other person I was worried about was former Hanoi Rocks singer Michael Monroe, who recently revealed his softer but totally metal side in a streaming chat video by holding and smooching his horrifying but beloved hairless cat while speaking to fans in his native Finnish. We last left Monroe in 2015, when he had released his solo album Blackout States, which I pronounced “a rowdy but slightly corporatized amalgam of Lords of the New Church meets Dropkick Murphys throwbacking that gets plenty of style points.” If you like New York Dolls, and who couldn’t, you won’t hate this album, and he did demonstrate an ability to go with the flow of this awful new reality by streaming an acoustic show on April 23 through the Finnish music platform Ruutu.

You see, I worry about these people, I really do.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Email [email protected] for fastest response.

PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Here comes the next general-release Friday, June 5, when your rock ’n’ roll dreams will come true and so on and so forth, with the help of new albums! The first new LP we’ll chat about is from Dion, whose new album, Blues with Friends, is on the way! I know, he’s super old, but come on, that’s what makes him awesome! All those old tunes your grandmother dances to at the hot dogs and beans supper, like “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer” and “Come Go With Me”? Yeah, that’s Dion DiMucci, and after he did those songs he did a cover of Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” just to bum out all the straights who thought he was safe to be around, but then he got so disgusted with blotter-acid-hippies and whatnot that he started doing Christian rock, but he got sick of that, and now he has a new album, which would definitely get an automatic A+ grade in my award-winning review column if I had received the album from his PR guys. But whatever, I could probably just extrapolate and make up something, because as we’ve discussed, it’s titled Blues with Friends, which means it’s a bunch of blues songs with guest singers like the barking Bowser dog-man from Sha Na Na and whatnot, whoever’s still alive, let’s go see! Wait, whoa, this isn’t just a bunch of dead guys, Bruce Springsteen and his wife are guests on the song “Hymn to Him,” and look, guys, it’s loony bearded loon Billy Gibbons, from ZZ Top, on the song “Bam Bang Boom!” That song’s wicked cool, if you like old 12-bar blues, beards and hot chicks! This is AWESOME.

• The 10th album from Norwegian indie-folk dude Sondre Lerche is titled Patience. Mayhaps you know him from his quiet-loud-quiet Brooklyn-hipster song “Bad Law,” which was adamantly “eh,” but it’s a new year, and he’s no longer a tedious Brooklyn hipster; now he’s in Los Angeles, doing shots with all the sleazy L.A. promoters who laugh behind his back. The new single is “Why Would I Let You Go,” a sucky, pointless unplugged guitar tune that comes off like Bon Iver without the reverb cranked to 11. There’s no loud part, so I might use it to deal with my insomnia.

• LA Priest is the stage name of Samuel Eastgate, an Englishman who is in the band Late of the Pier, a ska/prog/dance-punk-style Strokes-wannabe band that managed to put out an entire one album in 12 years of existence. His new album, GENE, is in your pirate radio and includes the single “What Moves,” a mildly funky quirk-chill trip that’s a little bit Jamie Lidell and a little bit Gorillaz. You might like it if you’ve recently undergone a lobotomy, and stuff.

• Lastly, it’s Australian indie-rock band Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, whose sound has been compared to fellow Australians The Go-Betweens. The new album, Sideways to New Italy, includes a song called “She’s There,” which sounds like Smashing Pumpkins trying to be a boyband. It’s OK for what it is, as far as meatless sports-bar-rock goes; at least it’s not Kaiser Chiefs.